1991: The Zine

Newgrounds was not originally intended for the web, but rather was a Neo Geo fanzine by the name "New Ground", "Neo" being a synonym for "New", and "Geo" being a synonym for "Ground". I published New Ground from my parents' basement in Perkasie, PA, sending sporadic issues to around 100 members of a club on Prodigy. I was 13 at the time, which explains why I have so much faith in today's thirteen year olds.

1995: Tangled in the Web

When I first obtained space to create my own web page, I immediately took on the New Ground name. The only problem was I wanted something more, to imply it was the next step. Thus "New Ground Remix" was born!

I used up my "tfulp" webspace at fast.net, so I branched my content into my brother Wade's "wadef" space as well. I had tidbits of goofy content and a page for "OGRE Programming", which was the group my friends and I formed for programming local dial-up BBS games. Wade operated a dial-up BBS known as "Chaotic Order" and I produced exclusive games for it, such as Ambition and Nippon X!

New Ground Remix had some mildly interesting content, but was pointless until the last few weeks of the summer of 1996 when my friends had all left for college. It was in this time that I created Club a Seal and Assassin, the games that finally brought meaning to the name New Ground. A small NG cult followed.

1996: Freshman Slump

As a student of Drexel University, I had a network connection in the dorms and not a modem. Because of this, I no longer had dial-up access to my home service provider, and could no longer access the New Ground Remix FTP server (they don't allow outside IPs to enter). In other words, I could no longer update New Ground Remix. During freshman year I didn't accomplish much, but I did start to work on a new layout for Assassin.

1997: Tale of Two Newgrounds

During the winter of sophomore year, I got back on the ball and created Club a Seal II and Assassin II. I decided I needed a new place to house these great attractions, so New Ground Atomix was born on my Drexel webspace. There were now two separate and chaotic entities - NGR and NGA, with 2 versions of Club a Seal and Assassin to boot. Still on a roll, I produced Cat Dynamics and Beep Me Jesus. New Ground Atomix had taken on a solid form, kinda like how digested food becomes a turd.

1998: The Call to Flash

I moved into an apartment in the spring and once again had direct dial-up access to my home service provider. It was at this point that I finally took the time to combine Assassin I and II into a single site. I didn't bother to redirect users who were still going to Assassin I, so a bulk of traffic continued to ignore New Ground Atomix and stay in Remix instead. I wasn't very motivated, so my activity crawled to a stop and stayed that way until a few months later when I began experimenting with Macromedia Flash. A Flash front page was introduced and the infamous Telebubby Fun Land was born.

In late September I received a call from Inside Edition; they wanted to do a piece on Assassin! I got very excited and quickly got back on the ball. I decided it was time for NGA to get its own domain name, so that when it appeared on the TV screen it was easy for viewers to remember the URL. I decided on "Newgrounds", plural. Club a Seal I and II were combined and users were redirected from the old sites to newgrounds.com. I paid $33 per month out of pocket to host the site.

Inside Edition never followed up with me after that initial contact. This did not stop me, as I was ecstatic to have my own domain name. I continued to update the current features and traffic boomed. I had to change hosts to accommodate the traffic, and started producing t-shirts in an attempt to pay off hosting fees.

1999: Hot New Games

What a difference a domain name makes! Traffic to newgrounds.com was booming and every few months it seemed like I had to upgrade to a new host. Banner ads were introduced to pay growing hosting bills. Ultimately, I was unable to make ends meet. My host wanted over $1000 per month and I was dropped by my only good ad company due to the controversial content on NG (back then it was just comedic violence, go figure). Running out of options, I partnered with Troma, who hosted the site in exchange for a cut of ad revenue.

This year introduced some legal disagreements, most notably my little tiff with the BBC. The site had received global attention, having been featured in Yahoo Internet Life magazine, Stuff Magazine, Internet Tonight (ZDTV), wired.com and many other media outlets. Some backlash was inevitable.

This year also saw the introduction of Pico's School, hailed by many as the pinnacle of Flash 3 "programming". I say that in quotes because Flash 3 didn't offer much in terms of programming - it didn't even support variables. I came up with a very complex work-around for tracking events and data, making Pico the most advanced Flash 3 game I am aware of. It wasn't until Flash 4 that variables were introduced, and Pico would have been much easier to make. :)

By the end of the year, I had also made UFA and Samurai Asshole. I actually programmed a good portion of them while working at Qwest, but I was a consultant, so I didn't bill them for the hours.

2000: Full-Time Job

The new year brought with it a tightened Newgrounds community. A general navbar was finally added to the top of each page, making it much easier to explore the site. I also added a chat room and message board, which further brought users to the forefront. Users became more addicted, and more and more were sending me their own Flash creations, which I showcased in a little corner of the site called "The Portal." The number of submissions was starting to become overwhelming!

My friend Ross became an essential part of NG when he built the Grounds Gold system, which allowed users to gain points for visiting the site. Ross and I would have frequent Newgrounds discussions at the gym, the main topic being a system to automatically accept and showcase user submissions. Ad revenue was picking up, so I hired Ross and we got to work developing the automated Portal.

During this time, I left my job at Qwest and Ross and I both eventually stopped signing up for classes at Drexel - which I suppose made us drop-outs. Newgrounds became a full-time focus. The automated Portal was our dream. Its launch would forever change the face of Newgrounds, which, at that point, was still predominantly my personal showcase. The automated Portal opened the floor to much better artists, who submitted quality work that would soon surpass my own. Newgrounds was the first Flash showcase site of this type, which is what really helped establish it as THE place to show off your work.

Despite the competition from new artists, I kept making my own stuff. Games from this year included Wasted Sky and the Police Simulator!

It was also around this time that I met Shok, a Newgrounds fan who happened to be DJing at Shampoo (Philly club). We soon became good friends and teamed up to create the catchy FDA music videos. Shok and I teamed up for plenty of other exploits, such as the Newgrounds party.

Ross coded a new message board from the ground up, integrating it with our existing user system. The growing community required increasing administration so I hired my brother Wade to help keep up with the users. Wade had always been an active, dedicated user of the site, so he was the perfect choice to help keep an eye on everything that went on.

I also hired my friend Andrew Brozyna on a short-term basis to do some art for the site before moving to DC. During that time we introduced the Newgrounds tank logo and level icons to denote user voting power. By the end of 2000, Newgrounds had one of the most active user communities on the internet and just four employees!

2001: Hustle to Survive

Just when things were picking up steam, the Internet bubble burst. We watched almost every major entertainment site go out of business, while struggling to keep ourselves afloat. Andy had already moved to DC as planned, so there were just three of us remaining. Ad companies defaulted on payment and things got really tight.

2002: Imminent Comeback

The year started off on a sad note. Our hosting was in dire need of expensive new hardware and the slow servers made working on the site a nightmare. I had resorted to running adult ads to cover expenses and it didn't help our image very much. Ross decided to move on and pursue his dream of teaching.

The new lean and mean Newgrounds consisted of just me and Wade. The automated Portal continued to chug along, thanks to Ross's exceptional work. We sometimes joke that we could die and the site would keep running. In reality, the site needs constant, nearly infinite maintenance. Blocking stupid AOL users would have helped... You'd have to be around back then to understand.

The year 2002 wasn't coming along nearly as well as the previous two years. Newgrounds remained popular, but growth was stagnant and the servers were choking to death.

One good thing did come from this downturn - Ross and I both went back to school at Drexel. I finally graduated, receiving a BS in Information Systems. School kept me busy during this time, Wade and I kept the site updated and I kept making games. I teamed up with Dan Paladin (then known merely as Synj) to produce Alien Hominid, with no clue of where that would eventually lead.

Upon getting my degree, I moved to Atlanta for a change of scenery. This left Ross at his new job and Wade back in PA, officially breaking up any semblance of a Newgrounds HQ.

The lack of advancement was really getting us down when out of the blue, something amazing happened. I was talking to a long-time NG buddy, James, when he offered to take a look at our PHP. It turned out that over the years, James had become quite a whiz with PHP and database-related programming. I by sending him individual files to work on but it wasn't long before we gave him the keys to the kingdom; direct access to everything on Newgrounds.

James tore in like an animal, overhauling and optimizing everything in sight. The site began to perform better than it had for the past year and we were implementing fresh new features. Reaching a new peak in usage, we got Troma to agree to some of the server upgrades we had been needing. The site was running better than it had in the past two years and I finished off December with the release of three games: Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest, Chainsaw the Children and Sack Smash 2003!

2003: Growing Up, Moving Out

The effects of the Internet crash were still being felt across the globe. Our bandwidth bills were huge and ad revenue wasn't. In February, Troma released us from our affiliate contract and ceased operation of the Tromaville Network. We were given full control of the servers in NYC.

Having closed down their internet operations, Troma no longer needed their sys admin, who continued to help Newgrounds by maintaining our servers in NYC on a part-time basis. I was finally in full control of site-wide advertising, which meant I could better manage the ads and collect checks directly. Our hosting bills were cut to a fraction of what they had been, thanks to cheap new bandwidth plans made available by Cogent Communications. We finally had the money to grow!

This was the perfect time to upgrade our hosting infrastructure, as we had just launched the Audio Portal, where independent musicians could showcase their work and have it featured in web games and movies. To sustain growth, we bought a new database server and added several new webservers. Old 4U (four shelves of rackspace) servers were replaced with new, faster 1U (one shelf) servers. Even then, our single cabinet looked like it would become full in the near future.

March 21st marked the day when Wade became a Dad and I became an Uncle! I made the trip up from Atlanta to visit and found a house in the process. It was time for me to move back to the Philadelphia area and put down some roots for NG.

On April 1st, Dan Paladin and I partnered up with some of his co-workers in San Diego to form the Behemoth and make a console version of Alien Hominid. This was no April Fools joke; making a console game is serious business! I went on to spend the rest of my year and much of 2004 working on this project.

In mid April, we launched the multi-author system. This allowed Dan and I to both finally share credits on Alien Hominid and opened the door for many other collaborative projects.

I flew out to San Diego in June to meet the Behemoth team face-to-face for the first time and attend E3 in LA. I also happened to meet Trent Reznor! It was a very brief meeting. This trip marked the first of many trips to San Diego over the next year and a half. I would fly out for weeks at a time, working 16 hour days and sleeping at the office. Did I mention console games are serious business?

June also marked the official hiring of James as a full-time NG staff member! This was the first time since the dot com crash that I was able to hire a new full-time staff member. It was a great feeling to be back in action.

In July, long-time Portal contributor Will Stamper surprised us with a new front page design. It took NG to a whole new visual level! It also made us dependent on Stamper for all future site design work... How sneaky! We continued to "Stamperize" other parts of the site, although for many months the overall site experience was inconsistent.

Eventually, Francois took a new job in NYC that kept him too busy to manage the NG servers. We realized it was time to move Newgrounds to Philly and finally take on 100% of the responsibility for NG hosting. Philly real estate is a lot cheaper than NYC, so we were able to get two cabinets for the cost of the one we had in NYC. On the day after Halloween, my friend Tim and I drove a rental SUV into Manhattan, packed up over 20 servers and brought them to the new facility in Philly.

Moving the site to a new city was a big task - it required getting the space set up at the new facility, as well as coordinating for the bandwidth provider to switch us over on the day of the move. Everyone had to work together to get everything in place, but the final transition was relatively flawless. The site was back up that same day.

Over the course of the year, we bumped our bandwidth cap from 100mbps to 300mbps. Our hosting fees returned to five figures per month, but NG bandwidth was over $20k per month during the downturn so we were still grateful.

It was an amazing year but I was bummed out that I didn't release any new Flash games. I made a commitment to myself that I would not start any other programming projects until Alien Hominid was finished - a decision that came back to bite me. We hoped to have AH finished in September but it was taking much longer than anticipated. The end result was worth all the work, though!

Having moved back to the Philadelphia area, I started getting serious about finding an office.

2004: Our Console Debut!

After a long dry spell, 2004 is the year when revenue really started to kick in for Newgrounds. I'm not talking millions of dollars, but definitely enough to keep things moving. I narrowed my office search to the Glenside area, just north of Philadelphia.

In January, Dan Paladin moved to the Philadelphia area so that we could get hardcore with developing Alien Hominid for consoles. The rest of the team was still out in San Diego, so regular trips were still necessary and they stretched for weeks at a time.

The local crew continued to grow, as Stamper moved up from Florida in July and became an official member of the NG staff. Having Stamper around helped us get more serious about the visual presentation of NG. We continued to work towards making the site design consistent; at one point, we had three generations of layouts all intermixed. A new nav was introduced in August and we worked tirelessly to make sure it was consistent across most of the site. Stamper "Stamperized" parts of NG that had been neglected and re-Stamperized his 2003 layout to fit the new look.

This was the year of the Time Trials. The Time Trials were started by Luis and some friends, who had the idea of giving authors a short deadline to produce animations around a central theme. The end results were collaborative submissions where multiple artists were featured and credited, using our multi-author credit system. The collaborative submission concept soon grew beyond the Time Trials and became known as the more general NG Collab. We originally built the multi-author system for teams of artists and programmers; it was cool to see the massive collaborations that came about as a result.

In September, I moved from my house on the border of North Philly (not the nicest area) to a house in Glenside. I figured if I was gonna make a base in Glenside, I should live there too!

I hired my friend Tim as the full-time sys admin, which was really important considering how much hardware we have and how much attention it needs. Tim had been previously assisting me on a volunteer basis, as Stamper had done with site design in the past. It was great to finally hire the people who had given so much to NG in the past!

We continued to upgrade the site hardware to meet demand, although our expansion resulted in technical issues at times. By the end of the year, we were consuming 500mbps of bandwidth!

The development of Alien Hominid continued to drag on for most of 2004. Not only were we developing the game, we were developing merchandise as well. We produced t-shirts and figures and sold them at Comic-Con while showcasing a nearly finished version of AH. Check out my Comic-Con 2004 coverage!

It all came to a grand finale in November, when Alien Hominid finally hit stores. Who would have thought that would ever happen? Seeing it on the shelves was a very euphoric feeling, although I still say nothing beats the rush of submitting a new Flash to NG. :)

The year wasn't over yet! December 6, 2004... A day that will live on in infamy... The day Numa Numa Dance made its internet premier right here on Newgrounds. No one anticipated how much press and popularity would follow. Can you believe YouTube wouldn't launch until a year later?!

2005: Busy Year

With Alien Hominid on shelves, I was really scrambling to get some new games of my own on the web. Dan and I had been working to release "Dad 'n Me", a game where you beat up kids on the playground. Jose and I were also working on another long awaited project, that I no longer talk about anymore because I don't want to tease anyone (although I guess I just did).

In February, John and I attended Slamdance in Park City, Utah. We were part of the Independent Games Competition. Newgrounds also launched its official monthly contest with cash prizes!

We celebrated April Fools this year by changing the site to Numagrounds, a spoof on the popularity of Numa Numa Dance. I need to dig up a picture of our header. That same day, John and I flew out to England to meet with Zoo Digital, our European publisher for Alien Hominid. We stayed with James' (LilJim) parents in Doncaster for most of the trip, although by day we were in Sheffield. We spent our last leg of the trip in Manchester, doing press interviews. I've been to London a few times, but it was nice to finally tour Sheffield, Doncaster and Manchester! It was also great to see James, who then followed up with a visit to the US before the month was over!

In May, I went out to LA with the Behemoth team for E3. The coolest thing had to be all the copies of Game Developer magazine floating around - Alien Hominid was on the front cover!

June 17th was the first ever NG Mod Meetup! A ton of NG mods came to Philly and stayed at the Embassy Suites. What followed was a lot of drinking, walking and good times overall.

In July, I flew out to LA to make a one week appearance as guest host on Attack of the Show, a daily show on G4TV and a live broadcast! I really need to put a page together with pictures and videos from the appearance. After my last appearance, I drove down to San Diego to prep for Comic-Con, which was the following week. We were selling copies of Alien Hominid but also unveiling a sneak peak at our new console game! Check out my Comic-Con 2005 wrap-up.

July was a busy month overall, as July's tend to be. The grand finale was the release of a new game I made with Dan Paladin; Dad 'n Me!

In August, James finished coding a new content management system which allows us to more easily categorize content without digging through HTML code and FTP. We also started allowing authors to upload their own icons, and James made tools to submit icons, so that users could help us fill in missing icons from years past!

August 15th was the fourth anniversary of the Clock Crew and the largest Clock Day ever. We received so many great Clock submissions, they got their own page just for the event!

To celebrate back-to-school time, we had an NG Campus Promo contest, where users were asked to creatively promote Newgrounds on campus. Check out the winners! You haven't seen it all until you've seen StrawberryClock riding a train.

On September 16th, I proposed to my girlfriend April while we were on vacation in Las Vegas. I did it after dinner at the Eiffel Tower Resaurant, overlooking the Bellagio fountains! April said yes!

In October, I made another guest appearance on Attack of the Show, this time to show highlights from our Halloween 2005 collection. We received tons of great submissions this year! If NG keeps getting better every year, I can't even imagine how good it will be in 2006.

For years now, I've talked of my dreams to have a Newgrounds HQ. That finally happened, when I found a building to call home for NG. We moved to the office in mid October and final settlement on the building was in November. I put together a page about the early setup at the office! Stamper also produced a wonderful video of us smashing through walls with our feet.

Towards the end of the year, Josh from the Behemoth team moved here all the way from San Diego to facilitate console game development. We also hired Jeff Bandelin (JohnnyUtah), the artist who won our Opie & Anthony contest. Jose Ortiz (Mindchamber) began commuting from Brooklyn and making good use of the office apartment. Tim had a lot more space to work on servers.

In December, John and I traveled to France to share our new console game with potential publishers! While I was in France, we celebrated Denvish Day on NG. My contribution was Denvish Diving. I came back with a stomach bug that lasted for two weeks, could have been the raw meat.

Also worth noting is that we started showcasing Audio Portal submissions on the front page. The Audio Portal is a very important part of Newgrounds and often waits on the backburner while other features are developed. We greatly appreciate all the support we have received from musicians and I'm sorry for the neglect! The final noteworthy item of the year is our Christmas 2005 collection. We received more holiday submissions than ever! Bandwidth usage exceeded 800mbps during peak hours.

2006: Getting Down to Business

We started the new year settled in at the office with a lot on our plates. The groundwork was being laid for the next big redesign which would launch the following year. There were hints of change coming to the site, such as an overhaul of the account system that had previously consisted of a series of pop-up windows.

Then we unveiled a new header, with JohnnyUtah's new tank logo! Old vs. New:

We also introduced a new slogan. "The Problems of the Future, Today!" was replaced by "Everything, by Everyone." You could say we lost some of our edge that day, but the old slogan was no longer relevant to what NG was becoming.

We wanted the new site design to be done with CSS, so my friend and fellow Drexel alum Bob joined the team in March as our official HTML / CSS developer! Bob would later spearhead the Newgrounds Store as well.

Also in March, Dan and I won an award for Dad 'n Me; best web game of the year! We won the award at the Independent Games Festival, in San Jose.

April 30th, in addition to being my birthday, marked the first ever Pico Day. We received a ton of great fan-made Pico submissions, and gave out over $6,000 in cash prizes.

In May we were joined by Mike, who rose from the community in response to my request for game developers! Mike would help out with aspects of the upcoming Castle Crashers, but also worked on features for NG, such as an audio visualizer that would be introduced with our upcoming redesign.

Due to the increased amount of spam-bots spidering Newgrounds for email addresses, we replaced email links with the Private Messaging system! I can't imagine life without it.

The summer of 2006 marked a big moment for the NG team: The return of Ross! With both Ross and Liljim on the team, the future looked bright.

To prepare for the introduction of user pages with their own URLs, we undertook a massive change of the username standards. It took a few months but went pretty well.

The Flash Portal had been programmed by Ross and the Audio Portal had been programming by Liljim, so one of our goals of the upcoming redesign was to overhaul the Flash and Audio Portals to share more common features (such as voting and reviews), so that we could "easily" include an Art Portal with the launch. While we did manage to make the portals more unified, we ultimately accepted the reality that new portals were further off, so we launched the Art Forum in the meantime.

LisVender, a Newgrounds contributor, met Weird Al as a result of one of his submissions! It turns out Matt Groening's (creator of the Simpsons) son is an NG fan and Matt showed Weird Al the submission during a Simpson's party. This has to be one of my favorite stories ever.

The year ended with our first ever Treasure Hunt and Wacom giveaway! Good habits are hard to break; these have been annual traditions ever since.

2007: The Great Redesign

For the first half of the year, we were all pretty immersed in the ongoing site redesign. The rest of my time was spent working on Castle Crashers, which won some awards at the IGF with a demo build.

With both projects well past their anticipated launch dates, it was probably bad timing to goof off one night and release the Queers of War collab. We really were working hard the rest of the time and we did managed to release Alien Hominid on XBLA in February!

April and I got married on May 12th!

We developed the Tank Trophy this year, introducing a Best of the Year awards list for the first time on NG. It's a serious trophy, probably nicer than anything outside an Oscar or Grammy and better IMO.

I popped out a video for Luis Day, to show my appreciation of the guy who would go on to win our first User of the Year trophy.

July 16th marked the launch of our redesign, two years in the making! Details are listed in the announcement post but major advancements include a streamlined layout, faster load-times, user pages instead of profiles and the web's first ever real-time audio visualizations!

September 22nd was our first ever Madness Day, now an annual tradition.

Upon setting up the NG Store, I obtained a sales tax ID. This apparently raised a flag with the PA Department of Revenue, who wondered why we hadn't filed sales tax in previous years. I explained that it was because we only started selling goods recently, to which the auditor responded, "Well surely you've bought things you owe tax on." I was completely unaware of the Use Tax for out of state goods.

So you know what this meant - AUDIT! To prepare for the audit, I had to gather receipts and invoices for every dollar we spent from 2004-2007, records of all income generated from 2004-2007 and payroll reports from 2004-2007. Any dollar unaccounted for would be subject to 6% PA sales tax.

When all was said and done we owed money on some servers that were bought in 2005 from a company that wasn't charging PA sales tax. The real burn was the time lost gathering records, the stress and the accountant fees. And the audit ran right through Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, we unveiled the Penicorn plush, a perfect stocking stuffer!

2008: Post-Redesign

The majority of 2008 was a dark year for me personally because I had finally accepted the reality that Castle Crashers had to be finished. Fortunately, darkness is followed by light and we managed to see it through.

Newgrounds itself had some unfortunate luck this year. Things looked bright out the gate; Ross and liljim were wrapping up post-redesign improvements and a friend from Drexel was developing the new NG Store on a contract basis. Then Ross announced he was leaving for a job with Yahoo. Having been working from home in New York, Ross yearned to be surrounded by a team of programmers in an office and so the second coming of Ross came to an end. Around the same time we realized the store "wasn't getting there" and needed to be re-evaluated.

We were quick to go on the hunt for a new programmer and were fortunate to find Rob. Rob decided it would be best to... start the store from scratch. We aren't always surfing on rainbows over here! The good news is that Rob finished the store and it launched in August. It was a stumbling block for NG but we could now move on.

And that wasn't the only highlight in August; Castle Crashers launched for XBLA!

PsychoGoldfish had meanwhile been working on the NG API and payment system. In September we introduced the rev-split feature, where authors of Flash submissions could determine who gets what % of the revenue generated by Flash Ads, including songs from the Audio Portal.

Rob introduced a new genre-select for games and movies based on a list I had pondered and researched for the past year. The goal: create the nerdiest, most comprehensive list of game genres on the web. The actual use of that information would come much later. We also added tags to games and movies, also to be used later.

There were plenty of highlights beyond the development end of NG. User of the Year Luis hosted our first Munny competition and has continued to do so on an annual basis since. A bunch of guys from NG teamed up to take on an NG booth at Apple Con in NYC. Pico Day, Madness Day, the Treasure Hunt, Halloween, Wacom giveaway and Winter Flash-Off all went great.

2009: Fighting a Recession

During April and in the midst of "the Great Recession" we introduced the Page Ads system, giving artists the opportunity to monetize their pages here on NG.

In May we announced the Power of Three summer event, bringing together artists, programmers and musicians to create original games and raise money for charity! The roster was ambitious. A lot of teams haven't finished their games yet but a number of great games have been made, such as Time Fkuc, which introduced the Sharing component of our API to share user-generated levels!

In June Rob unveiled the Art Portal, our third portal and one step closer to the larger creative vision for NG!

2010-2011: Scope Creep

The next two years were pretty much us stuck in development hell and prepping the site for the redesign. All new html, all new javascript, 140,000+ new sized thumbnails, etc. etc. etc. I'll fill this in some day I swear.

2012: Redesign Tiem and a Break from Flash

We kicked off the year with the release of our first and possibly last iPhone game, GroundCats!

The NG redesign launched on February 7th, introducing a fresh new look, more advanced content browsing, in-site artist feeds (previously only available via email), a community calendar and a new Project System for managing games, movies and audio.

Much of the year was spent fine-tuning and making subtle improvements to the new site, such as project unpublishing, showing follower counts on artist pages, etc. We did however roll out some big features that shake up the dynamic of how people have viewed NG for the past decade.

In mid-April we introduced our video player, allowing for the first time ever movies that weren't in SWF format. Improvements have been ongoing, with our video conversion server slated to launch by the end of the year, allowing for much more mobile-friendly versions of existing videos. We are also beginning an initiative to create video versions of all the classic NG content, so that it may exist forever on future platforms that may not support Flash.

To alleviate some of the strain of a tough year, we launched the Supporter Upgrade option in the store. Supporters can pay $25 to browse NG ad-free (with the exception of ads people insert in their games and movies) for a year. The site runs a lot better and looks a lot nicer without them.

In October we unveiled support for HTML5 games on NG, making it official that we won't live or die by Flash, as much as we still love it.

We also brought Brendon onto the NG team! Brendon previously worked with PsychoGoldfish on a multiplayer server and they intend to revisit that project with modern standards. Brendon is also working with Mike to get our video conversion server on-line and is performing sys-admin duties alongside Tim.